


Not Your World

by ashesandhoney



Series: The Gray Chronicles (Tessa in the 20th Century) [4]
Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Brother Zachariah - Freeform, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 12:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7223278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set sometime between 1937 and 2008, Tessa meets and old friend while meddling in Shadowhunter business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Your World

She shouldn’t have been there. This was Clave business and it had been a long time since that had been her business but she had been watching. She couldn’t help it. A piece of her mind was already laying out everything that had happened into the proper format for a witness’s report to be submitted to the Inquisitor. Anything that included mundanes always required so many reports. Maybe she needed to know if they had survived, maybe she had hoped against all impossible hopes that this would happen, maybe she was just letting her curiosity get the better of her.

The Silent Brothers had given up on their carriages and traveled in black cars these days. They were just as eerie, just as strange, but it looked almost normal compared to the old carriages. Tessa sat in a cafe across the street, pretending to be reading, pretending the glamour was keeping her attention away like it was keeping everyone else’s distracted. But then he got out of the car. Even from a distance, even from the back, she was sure.

The waitress, refilling her coffee followed her gaze and frowned and Tessa asked for a chocolate croissant because it was the first thing on the menu. It pulled the waitress’s attention back before she could notice anything across the street but Tessa also missed him. She didn’t see him enter the house. Something inside ached.

Once she had seen Jem regularly. Between official business, Will’s mad schemes, Jem’s own impulsive tendencies to just show up sometimes, he’d been a part of her life but in the years since she left the Clave behind, since Will had passed, she hadn’t seen him enough. Some years passed and all she got was a single hour on the bridge and nothing more. It had been six months.

She left her croissant untouched, finished her coffee and left too much money on the table before slipping out across the street. A voice in her head told her to turn around, that people had died there and there was no place for her in these investigations. Not your life, not your world, not anymore. But it didn’t stop her. She went in through the main door. Shadowhunters expected their glamours and their reputation to work and keep anything out.

She saw the first blood streaks in the dining room and her stomach turned but she didn’t stop. The bodies were gone. She stopped in the hallway and listened. Footsteps above her and soft voices ahead. Then his voice. It whispered through her mind but the familiarity of it was like a touch. Her heart broke. She hadn’t been expecting it and it pushed the air out of her. Standing in a blood smeared house that smelled of death she felt an emptiness, a missing, so deeply that her chest ached.

Not your world.

Not your Jem.

 _Tessa?_ he was there in her head, _Would you come to the kitchen?_

As though this were planned, as though it were normal and he was expecting her. She braced herself and stepped around the blood and into the linoleum tiled kitchen. Untouched. No blood, nothing broken, a glass sitting beside the sink. Jem stood near the back door, his hood down and his hands folded in front of him. A ripple of feeling came off of him, some very quiet echo of her loneliness and her heart broke all over again but she kept it off her face. The other silent brother, someone she didn’t recognize, stood by the fridge looking incongruous beside the blue appliance. He didn’t react to her presence.

 _How are you?_ he asked.

She smiled, “As well as might be expected. I daren’t stay long.”

She didn’t say the other part because it was Jem and she didn’t need to. She didn’t need to say, “I just needed to see you.” He looked at her. Even with his eyes closed, she didn’t doubt that he was looking at her. She looked at the lines of his face like she could further commit them to memory though she didn’t cross the room to him.

 _Stay a little longer. We could use your assistance,_ he said.

The old patterns. Keep coming up with official reasons to stay and you could stretch a meeting from five minutes into hours. Will had been so good at it. Her heart couldn’t take memories of Will while it was like this. She was already falling apart. Lucie was gone. Eleven months ago. She would lose Jamie too. She shut every memory out.

“I will assist however I can,” she said.

 _There’s a little girl hiding in the cupboard below the sink, we frighten her_ , Jem said.

Tessa took a deep breath and walked around the table to brush her hand against Jem’s on her way to the cabinet he stood by. He briefly grabbed her fingers and even though they were cold and hard, her breath hitched but throwing her arms around his neck and holding on forever wasn’t an option so she knelt down beside the wood door and opened it just a crack. A little girl had been tucked back behind a garbage bin and a box of cleaning supplies. Well hidden. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and she looked up at Tessa with wide brown eyes.

“Are the monsters gone?” she asked.

“Yes, angel,” Tessa said and she looked up pointedly at the Shadowhunter by the fridge and then a little more wistfully at Jem. He brushed his fingers against her shoulder, out of sight of the little girl, and then the two of them moved out of the room. Tessa shuffled things in the cabinet and pulled the child out. She was small and shook. Tessa flicked a finger and the door to the bloody dining room swung shut before she stood up with the girl cradled in her arms.

“Where’s my mom?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Tessa said and though it was the truth, she had a good idea. The girl wore a sweater wiht blood on the sleeve. Tessa shifted her to one hip and rolled the shirt back to see what looked like a bite mark, bloody and torn. She tried not to let sense memories of holding her own baby like this overtake her.

“My friend is a doctor, can he look at this cut?” she asked.

“A monster bit me, my mommy told me to hide,” the girl told her.

“I know,  your mommy is very smart. My friend is going to bandage you all up but I need you to close your eyes and listen very carefully to what he says, can you do that?” Tessa asked.

Tessa kept the little girl’s head against her shoulder while Jem drifted back into the room and cleaned and bandaged the wound with a gentleness that made the ache in Tessa’s heart worse.  Tessa whispered stories to the child when Jem worked. She told stories about a boy with silver hair and a violin and Jem added little details she missed. If the child could tell that one voice was inside her head, she didn’t seemed bothered. By the time the wound was stitched shut and wrapped in a clean white bandage, she was asleep.

Tessa looked at Jem over the little girl’s head and an image flashed through her imagination that was so vivid it felt real. Jem looking back at her with his eyes dark and flashing with intensity over the head of another child. For just a moment that image of a man older than the one she remembered with darker skin than this statue of a person and that sunrise smile she had almost forgotten was all she could see. Then she blinked and he was Brother Zachariah again.

 _Tessa_? his voice in her head took her by surprise, she had almost thought she would hear it but no, the dream was gone. She blinked back a rush of tears and started to say something but it all shattered when the door behind them slammed open.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice asked and they both turned to explain some version of the truth to a Shadowhunter stranger in torn gear. She was going to have to leave soon but she clung to that little flash of imagination as though it were something real. 

She was wrong.

Not her world but he would always be her Jem. 

**Author's Note:**

> Going through my tumblr tags, picking out the ficlets worth porting over. I had completely and utterly forgotten this one. I actually really like it!


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